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Exam candidates forget basic grammar

Some pupils’ work resembled James Joyce in stream-of-consciousness flowNiall Carson/PA

Teenagers were so enthusiastic during GCSE exams this year that some dispensed with punctuation altogether, in addition to having abandoned good grammar and spelling.

Some candidates’ work bore more resemblance to James Joyce in full stream-of-consciousness flow than a concise exam answer. Examiners from the OCR board complained that in one English literature paper, several candidates had presented a one-paragraph answer that ran to three pages.

The possessive apostrophe was much abused and a geography examiner said: “The quality of spelling, punctuation and grammar is becoming increasingly worrying. Key terms are often incorrectly spelt, even when they could be copied from the resource booklet . . . a large number of candidates gave ‘volcanoe’ as the singular of volcanoes.”